The present invention relates to a geometric processing system, and in particular, to a data base system for geometric/graphic processing in which geometric/graphic data can be efficiently processed at a high speed by use of a local processing when executing the geometric/graphic processing in a computer.
Examples of geometric/graphic processing include the design of LSI/VLSI, logic circuits, car bodies, buildings, machines, and plants, computer aided design (CAD) using the computer graphics technology, object analysis on data from satellites, and graphic analysis adopted in the medical field.
For example, in a CAD system to design LSI's, machines, buildings, and plants through a geometric processing, the size of geometry to be processed often becomes great, namely, the total number of the necessary elements is 10.sup.4 -10.sup.7. Specifically, the amount of data to be processed is considerably increased in a data processing system in which the processing must be effected on each data item related to the pertinent data. Moreover, the processing time elapsed in the computer increases as the value N becomes greater in such cases. Although the processing is possible in principle, the processing time is beyond the allowable range in the practical data processing, and hence the processing may become impossible in some cases.
One of the reasons why such a processing cannot be executed is that all the geometric data is processed even when the geometric processing essentially handles relationships between adjacent geometric items or manipulates overlapped items between geometric data. This is because special information related to the adjacent geometric data is not contained in the geometric data base. That is, even when only a portion of geometric data is to be locally processed, the data processing must be effected on all the geometric data. As a result, the processing other than the local processing required for the necessary portion must be executed.
There has been developed a system in which the geometric processing is performed with the specific information related to the adjacent geometric data stored in advance so as to avoid the difficulty. In such a system, however, the geometric shape is limited; furthermore, the amount of data is increased and the processing time accordingly becomes longer. Consequently, this scheme does not solve the problem described above.
Such a difficulty leads to a greater problem in a case of three-dimensional geometric processing in which the amount of data is considerably increased.